I posted a few weeks ago about how many of the folks in my life tested as ENFP on the Myers-Briggs personality inventory; I just checked the stats on my Facebook page, and of 64 of my friends who have taken the test and posted their results, 33 are ENFP and another 20 are NFs of one kind or another. I may be married to an ESTP, but don’t seem to have many as friends.
Weirdness…
On Facebook, there are many little applications one can add. I don’t add most of them, as they seem to clutter up the page. I did, however, add the “MyType” app, which allows you to take a short version of the Myers-Briggs personality test, and compare your score to your friends.
I’m a fairly consistent ENFP, though in my younger years, I was an ENFJ. When I’m feeling a bit low, I think I lean towards being an INFP. I’ve taken the Myers-Briggs test many times, clearly!
The studies say that ENFPs are only 2-3% of the population — but in the past few weeks, it’s turned out that about half of my friends on Facebook who take the test are also ENFPs. Some of these folks are those whom I “invited” to take the test, so they may have been influenced by my type — but it’s relatively difficult to “game” the test to control an outcome. The only possible conclusion, other than random coincidence, is that “like attracts like”, at least in friendship. It’s an interesting thing.
My wife is a strong ESTP, and we work very well together. We’re a very good combination at parties, and no doubt, we will someday be very entertaining (if not exhausting) parents for our children.
So, gentle readers, what’s your type? If you don’t know it, there are many some Myers-Briggs tests available online, but the real test — the most reliable one — is proprietary and tends to cost around $29. Or you can add Facebook and the MyType app.
Like most who have followed the life and career of Tony Blair, I was not surprised in the least by his decision to be received into the Roman Catholic Church, a decision made formal in a private ceremony last week. Long-affiliated with the fine old Christian Socialist Movement, his theology seemed to have been moving towards Rome for some time. (When Blair’s son Leo was born in 2000, a number of years younger than his other children with his wife, Cherie, there were very public rumors that the couple did not practice any form of artificial birth control, in keeping with Catholic teaching.)
I’ve had mixed feelings about Tony Blair for years now. But I wish him well, of course, as he moves forward on his spiritual journey. A great many Englishmen and women before him have “returned to Rome” before him, and he goes in fine company.
A little bit of me — just a little — is envious. My own religious peregrination has been fitful and dramatic, but it started with a late adolescent conversion from the atheism of my parents to Roman Catholicism. I was baptized and confirmed at the 1988 Easter Vigil, where I took the confirmation name Thomas. For a brief time, I seriously considered the priesthood — so great was my enthusiasm for the Church. My first marriage was solemnized with a full mass at St Paul the Apostle in Westwood, one of the larger Catholic parishes in West Los Angeles. During the first year of that marriage, I was a regular and enthusiastic communicant.
It was the end of my first marriage that, for me, made staying a Catholic untenable. Though we agreed on little else during the divorce process, my first wife and I were committed to not seeking an annulment, despite pressure from some of her Catholic relatives to get one. What had been done might now be undone, but we weren’t going to deny it had been done in the first place! And with the divorce came the bar from the eucharist. No more wafer and wine made into bread and blood for me, at least not in the Roman style.
I drifted away from Christ for the next few years after that 1992 divorce. When I came back, it was as a Protestant of one kind or another: an Anabaptist, a non-denominational charismatic, an Episcopalian. But here’s the rub: often, whether I’m at a Mennonite, Episcopal, or evangelical worship service, I find myself feeling as if what I’m participating in is somehow incomplete. There are churches, and then there is The Church. And while all the churches are somehow part of the Body of Christ, there is still for me a sense that the truest Church is Roman. Though I very rarely attend Mass any more, I admit that I feel something when I do that I have not felt anywhere else — and I have worshipped in more than my share of elsewheres.
I’m blissful in my fourth marriage. The chances of reconciling with my first wife are zero. I would never dream of raising our future children in a church community that didn’t see their parents’ marriage as being as licit and good as any other. As I understand it, the price of being allowed to become a regular communicant in the Catholic church would mean leaving my wife — or enduring a chaste marriage for the rest of our lives. I’ve checked this out with a few of my friends who know their canon law: without an annulment of my first marriage, or without a commitment to chastity within my current one, I’m going to have a hard time gettin’ to the communion rail. That price is much too high to pay.
It’s odd — I was a Mass-going Catholic for less than five years. That’s not even an eighth of my life. And yet Rome has a hold on me that nothing else has. And when I see the once-married Tony Blair received into the Church, my happiness for him is not untinged with envy.
Evel Knievel has died. I was seven when he hit the apex of his fame, trying to jump Snake River Canyon. In the year after he made that doomed attempt, I remember riding my Schwinn through the streets of Carmel, building little jumps with other children and playing a game that we simply called “Evel Knievel.” When I saw he died today, I had a sudden flashback to a time — nearly thirty-five years ago — when he was the hero of every kid in my school. I had a little plastic Evel Knievel motorcycle with a plastic action figure, and when I wasn’t building small wooden ramps out of particle board to do jumps on my bike, I was playing with that darned doll.
For someone who writes as much about masculinity as I do, it’s odd I don’t refer more often to the cultural icons of my childhood. Three public figures from the mid-’70s were, for me, the ultimate “men’s men”: O.J. Simpson, Evel Knievel, and the actor Tom Laughlin, who starred in The Trial of Billy Jack, an utterly forgettable film that was perhaps the first grown-up movie I saw in the theater (age eight). Another post for another time about these three very different men and their influence on a very young Hugo.
More than is absolutely necessary, I don’t grieve Norman Mailer’s passing. Of all the acclaimed American writers of the second half of the last century, his popularity was the most inexplicable to me. I found Mailer’s prose dull, and perhaps for that reason, his nasty, angry, posturing sexism seemed all the more obvious and shopworn to me. I tried three times to read The Naked and the Dead, and never finished it. I know I’m not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but in Mailer’s case, yikes, it’s hard.
Mailer is in a very small group of writers whom I find so impossible that I get irked the moment I even hear their names. The two others who come to mind are, for different reasons, Ayn Rand and Kahlil Gibran. I’ve actually read the major works of Rand (she’s the only writer I’ve ever read who can both bore and enrage simultaneously), and I’ve struggled with the Prophet. I’ve done a few weddings with my mail-order minister’s license, and at one, I even had to read a long section from Gibran. I did so cheerfully and without complaint, but to hear those pretentious, gummy syllables fall from my lips was hard. (And I know a thing or two about being pretentious and gummy.) Anyhow, the best thing I’ve read all year is Alan Jacob’s delicious take on Gibran in First Things. It’s not entirely Christian in spirit, but it’s very fine, and if you’re familiar with the Prophet’s style, you’ll be howling. An excerpt:
O Book, O Collected Works of Kahlil Gibran,
Published by Everyman’s Library on a dark day,
I lift you from the Earth to which I recently flung you
When my wrath grew too mighty for me,
I lift you from the Earth,
Noticing once more your annoying heft,
And thanking God—though such thanks are sinful—
That Kahlil Gibran died in New York in 1931
At the age of forty-eight,
So that he could write no more words,
So that this Book would not be yet larger than it is.
So, folks, which writer much esteemed and beloved by your friends do you really, really dislike?
I want to quickly note today’s tenth anniversary of the death of Diana. As I wrote last fall, Diana’s death remains — for me — the single most shocking public event of my lifetime, save for 9/11 itself. Here’s what I wrote last year:
As luck would have it, I flew into Manchester Airport on the very day Diana died — Sunday, August 31. I was traveling to a medieval history conference at Durham University, and had to drive the several hundred miles from Manchester to Durham in the pouring rain. It was my first experience of driving on the “wrong side” of the road, and to do so in a downpour, jet-lagged, while listening to the BBC coverage of the terrible accident and its aftermath was positively surreal. It was an amazing thing that my life didn’t also end on the same day that Diana’s did!
I was 14 when Diana and Charles married; six years younger than the Princess, I had an almost obligatory crush on her from the time their engagement was announced in February 1981. I was exactly the right age to be mesmerized by her. I followed her story for years and years, and like many, was saddened by the divorce. (The separation from Charles came in the Queen’s “annus horribilis” of 1992, the same year my first wife and I split up.) And I can say without question that if the 9/11 terrorist attacks are the single most shocking event of my lifetime, Diana’s death in that Paris tunnel ranks a close second. No shuttle explosion, no assassination attempt, no earthquake — no other historic happening is as vivid in my memory as those stunning days in 1997.
So in her honor, I’m listening to “I Vow to Thee My Country” and “Jerusalem” on my Itunes this morning. And while the theology of the former song is problematic, I confess I have no trouble singing along.
I’m very much in “summer hiatus” mode, with somewhat less time for and interest in blogging than usual. Nothing wrong with that.
I confess today a strange fascination with Gordon Ramsay, the celebrity chef whose restaurants, books, and television shows have won him a huge following on both sides of the Atlantic. He’s just about my age, a fellow 40 year-old marathon runner. I’m a loyal watcher of his shows on both Fox and BBC America, and I admit I find him to be an extraordinarily compelling figure. I even bought his autobiography last week.
Ramsay has no love for vegans, is notoriously temperamental, and is consistently foul-mouthed. He played for Rangers, for Pete’s sake; and I’m a fairly strong supporter of Celtic when it comes to the Glasgow derby. But at least on television, his tirades are balanced with what seems to be genuine tenderness and compassion. (I’m well aware that TV personas are often very different from real-life ones.) On his “Hell’s Kitchen” show, he berates and demeans the various chefs competing for the top prizes, and yet he also manages — or so it seems — to give each of them the kind of thoughtful, insightful reassurance that they need in order to move to the next level of their craft.
My fondness for Ramsay is similar to my fondness for Bobby Knight, of which I have written before. Though my own dear, late father was an exceedingly gentle and loving man, the sort from whom I almost never heard a harsh word, in my own life I’ve always responded very well to coaches and mentors whose personalities are mercurial and volcanic. I am one of those people who sometimes only does his absolute best when he is shouted at; I was one of those boys whose desire to please an authority figure was directly related to how stinting that professor or coach was with his praise.
In my teaching style, I am no Gordon Ramsay or Bobby Knight. I do have more of a temper in person than it might appear from this blog, however. I know, too, that what makes some students blossom makes others wilt. The great trick of teaching and youth ministry is adapting one’s style to the particular needs of the young people with whom one is working. Some folks need to be pushed, and pushed hard or they’ll sit there like bumps on a log; others, if pushed too much, retreat into shells and become hopelessly passive.
I’ve had a lot of teachers, mentors, and coaches in my life. (I work with a writing coach now, though I don’t employ her services on this blog). I appreciate warmth and encouragement, but I also appreciate being pushed — and pushed hard. I’ve had a few mentors who could be brutally tough on me (my longest-serving Twelve Step sponsor was a delightful mix of Coach Knight, Chef Ramsay and Mike Ditka), and I thrived under that mix of brutal candor, judicious sarcasm, and subtle encouragement.
I have my own inner Bobby Knight/Gordon Ramsay, and, when provoked, it takes a tremendous exertion of self-control to not imitate their behavior with students, colleagues, and my fellow inhabitants of greater Los Angeles. But I do take vicarious delight in watching men like that at work, and am eagerly anticipating the season finale of “Hell’s Kitchen” next week.
I’m in my office with a big stack of summer grading to do, and thus little time to post. I’m scatterbrained more than usual, perhaps knowing that once I’m done grading, my real vacation begins!
I’m reflecting this morning on several things, including the deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Bill Walsh. When I was in college, I watched (at my mother’s insistence) a tape of the former’s “The Seventh Seal”. I was transfixed and moved and stunned, and more than two decades later, it remains one of my favorite films ever made. I’m not a movie buff, and most of the rest of the Bergman oeuvre leaves me cold, but I watch “The Seventh Seal” at least once a year.
Bill Walsh coached the 49ers throughout my adolescence; I was raised a loyal Niner fan and followed them obsessively throughout the 1980s. My interest in professional football began to diminish just as Walsh retired in 1989. I don’t think I can name more than three current players on the 49er roster; I can still recall — without prompting — the names of each player in the marvelous 1984 secondary (Wright, Lott, Williamson, Hicks.) Walsh was my coaching hero, and though he was a head coach at Stanford, my fellow Cal alums know that long before he served in Palo Alto, he was an assistant coach at Berkeley in the early 1960s.
But in addition to thinking kind thoughts about these two very different influences on my adolescence, I’m also struck by this New York Times article on The Whys of Mating.
…thanks to psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin, we can at last count the whys. After asking nearly 2,000 people why they’d had sex, the researchers have assembled and categorized a total of 237 reasons — everything from “I wanted to feel closer to God” to “I was drunk.” They even found a few people who claimed to have been motivated by the desire to have a child.
Here’s the good part:
The results contradicted another stereotype about women: their supposed tendency to use sex to gain status or resources.
“Our findings suggest that men do these things more than women,” Dr. Buss said, alluding to the respondents who said they’d had sex to get things, like a promotion, a raise or a favor. Men were much more likely than women to say they’d had sex to “boost my social status” or because the partner was famous or “usually ‘out of my league.’ ”
Dr. Buss said, “Although I knew that having sex has consequences for reputation, it surprised me that people, notably men, would be motivated to have sex solely for social status and reputation enhancement.”
Well, it may have surprised the good doctor, but it isn’t a surprise to any of us who do gender studies. I’ve often praised Michael Kimmel’s use of the term “homosociality”. Homosociality is the notion that many heterosexual men engage in sexual activity as much to earn status with other men as for sexual pleasure itself. Having sex with women (particularly those who are perceived as “high-status” in the eyes of male peers) is as much about increasing the measure of one’s own manhood as it is about private satisfaction or erotic and emotional connection with another human being.
The study cited in the Times was done on students at the University of Texas, Austin. The men surveyed were generally of college-age, a time in men’s lives when they are particularly susceptible to homosocial pressures to win status. This study is a helpful reminder of the ubiquity of those pressures — and of the damage that homosociality inflicts on men and women alike. For those of us committed to working with teens and young adults, it’s still more incentive to focus our efforts on deconstructing young men’s desperate, heart-breaking, soul-destroying desire to win favor in the eyes of their male peers.
Challenging homosociality is near the top of the priority list for me in my men’s work. For those of us who want to be genuine egalitarians, what matters is not merely what we profess. Men who want to be real change agents need to treat women (and speak about women) the same way when they are “alone with the guys” as when they are in “mixed company.” Many women know what it’s like to have a boyfriend who is sweet and charming when she’s alone with him, but a jerk when he is surrounded by his friends (this is usually her bitter introduction to homosociality.) The great challenge is to be radically consistent, to be the same man always — with the brothers of Delta Kappa Epsilon, with one’s grandmother, with one’s girlfriend, with one’s teachers. I’ve seen young men achieve this time and time again, but rarely without colossal effort, and rarely without earning scorn from their peers. But there’s tremendous value in matching one’s language and one’s life. The damage that not doing so creates is equally tremendous, and the fact that women often bear the brunt of that failure is difficult to deny.
I gave up Myspace a couple of years ago, and my reasons were explained here.
I decided this week to go on Facebook, largely because I had been told by many that it had all the good stuff of Myspace and (mostly) none of the bad. I like the way it’s based on networks and communities.
But I really joined because the Pandagon and Feministe blogs have Facebook groups now, and that’s too good to pass up. And I found some groups for people who love John Edwards and chinchillas, and that’s cool too. (So far, not many who are really passionate about both.)
I’m assuming that I won’t regret this. But it could turn into a time-waster, and time is not something I can afford to waste.
Eugen Weber has died at 82. Weber taught history at UCLA for decades, and won the university’s distinguished teaching award in 1992. I was a TA at the time, but not one of his graduate students. Many of my friends worked under him, and had a near-reverential tone when they spoke of him.
His 1989 public television series “The Western Tradition” was a godsend to me when I first started teaching. My first year of teaching, I was terrified that I would run out of things to say after twenty minutes. My mother gave me all of the video tapes of his series, which covered the period from the Bronze Age to the Cold War. I used segments of them in both my ancient and modern history classes. Yes, students, I once showed videos all the time! As the years passed, I grew more confident as a lecturer and I began to incorporate Weber’s material into my own talks. I showed fewer and fewer episodes of “The Western Tradition”; I would guess that I last popped in one of Weber’s tapes in, oh, late 1998 or early 1999.
Over the course of my first five or six years of teaching, I must have seen each of his 52 half-hour episodes two or three dozen times. I knew his heavy Central European voice by heart, and was accustomed to his litle jokes (most of which flew right over the heads of my students). All those tapes have long since gathered dust, but I can recite the script of many from memory. Eugen Weber was a wonderful popularizer of Western Civilization, a first-rate scholar who was also a marvelous generalist. He was one of UCLA’s finest, and I deeply regret not having served as his teaching assistant or having worked more closely with him.
So, Jerry Falwell is gone, and even in his passing, the fella stirs up contention.
There are countless obituaries out there for all to read, and I have no interest in adding to them. I also have no interest in revisiting some of the nasty exchanges in which I have taken part over how best to respond to the passing of this exceptionally influential figure.
Jerry Falwell was one of those relatively few individuals who becomes so iconic that he ceases to be real. He was the first television evangelist of whom I ever heard, back when I was a kid. His “Old Time Gospel Hour” (which aired regularly throughout the early 1980s on Sunday mornings) was one of the few religious programs I ever saw in my high school years. For most of the Reagan era, Jerry was the public face of activist Christian conservatism. His indefagitable energy, his willingness to go into hostile media environments, and his intuitive understanding of how to apply political pressure made him extraordinarily influential extraordinarily fast.
Falwell was alternately loathed and loved because he had a larger-than-life personality. One of the best things that can be said of him was that he “dreamed big”, founding Liberty Baptist College (later Liberty University) and the Moral Majority that played such a vital role in the conservative resurgence of the 1980s. Another bit of praise: he rejected the idea that Christians ought to be quietist, ignoring the rough and tumble world of politics. He insisted that Christians had not only the right, but the obligation to become involved in shaping the culture. His primary concern was the erosion of sexual morality, of course, and those of us who call ourselves left-wing Christians do not give that concern primacy of place. We are far more deeply grieved by the plight of the poor than the private use of the pelvis. But we share with Falwell a belief that as Christians, we ought to bring our passionate faith commitments into the voting booth.
Falwell, famously, stayed in dialogue with his opponents. But dialogue, while a virtue in and of itself, isn’t always enough. The goal is dialogue that leads to enduring change. The best tribute I’ve read comes from one of my heroes, Mel White of Soulfource. White worked for Falwell for years before coming out of the closet, and remained hopeful till the end that Jerry, who renounced the racism of his youth, might also someday renounce the anti-gay bigotry of his mature years. He writes in the Advocate:
I was in the dentist’s chair when I heard that Jerry Falwell passed away. I couldn’t believe that I started crying. I had to find an office and I just cried. I was trying to think, Why the heck am I crying? I think I was crying for his family. He was a great father and husband, and he was a really good pastor—I’ve been going to his church for years, so I know—and he was a really good president of a university. There are 20,000 students at Liberty University, which Falwell founded, and they all like him.
I knew there would be just a huge hole in Virginia and in Lynchburg, and I felt for those people. But at the same time I was feeling more strongly that now we’ll never have a chance for Jerry Falwell to say, “I was wrong. I did wrong, and I said wrong, and I’m sorry. God creates gay people and loves them just like she created them. I’m not going to say anything more against gay people because I was wrong.” Imagine the consequence that would have had for so many people. Falwell was the face of homophobia.
Falwell was the face of many things. He was no fraud; there were no secrets in his closet, he wasn’t in it for the money. He was a true believer, a fellow member of the body of Christ. He was also deeply and profoundly wrong, and he did a tremendous amount of damage. Like Mel White, I am sorry that Falwell never got the chance in this life to reconsider publicly his views.
I prayed a lot for Jerry Falwell over the years, largely because as his brother in Christ, I was so angry at him so much of the time. In my head, he was the one Christian I least wanted to be like. He ceased to be Jerry Falwell the man, and became Jerry Falwell the symbol of intolerance and hate. While there is some legitimacy to that view, I can’t forget that the Apostle warns us against division in the body of Christ. I wrote in 2005:
I know that part of me likes to poke fun at Falwell because frankly, he embarrasses me. As an evangelical surrounded by folks more liberal on theological and cultural issues than myself, I find myself constantly lumped together with him. (If I had a dollar for every time a non-believer has said, “Hugo, now you’re sounding like Falwell”, I could afford, well, a nice dinner out for my fiancee and myself.) I don’t like his style, I don’t like his politics, and I think he misreads Scripture and gives other evangelicals a bad name in the public sphere. But I also recognize that this embarrassment is, at least partially, my own sinful pride at work. I don’t want other folks to think I’m at all like Jerry Falwell because I think my views are subtler, more compassionate, more evolved, and frankly, more congruent with the spirit of Christ than his. That’s arrogance and hubris, and it’s something I need to cop to and for which I need to repent. Paul tells us that the body of Christ is a unit made up of many parts. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you.” And though it is hard for me to believe sometimes, progressive Christians cannot say to a Jerry Falwell, we don’t need you. Sometimes I have my own uncharitable suspicions as to which part of the body of Christ Falwell represents, but I know that he and I and our churches share the same God, often pray the same prayers, and are struggling to discern divine will in our lives.
Peace to Jerry Falwell, may God grant him rest and may eternal light shine upon him. Peace to his family and friends who mourn his loss. Peace to the millions whom he marginalized and judged, may they know that they are loved and accepted — just as they are — by the same God who brought Jerry home.
UPDATE: And I’m sorry that in the thread about Jerry Falwell at Feministe, I made the mistake of calling down “shame” on those who celebrated Falwell’s death. I ought to know better than to use that word in particular. There’s far too much shame in the world, far too much of it imposed by men who look like me (and believe in my God and make love as I make love) on those who aren’t men (and don’t look like me, worship another God or none at all, and make love differently.) My anger and my haste made me forget that. I’m not only sorry for having offended, I’m sorry I used words that would inevitably be offensive. It was stupid and wrong. No excuses.
I’m done posting about Jerry.
I know I have readers in Austin. I’m gonna plug my old friend and former student, Tara Craig; she’s got a free gig tomorrow night at Austin Java; other upcoming gigs are listed on her Myspace page. I’ve seen her perform many times, and I wrote a short post about her a couple of years ago. Hey, there aren’t many lesbian Christian folk singers out there, at least not many with talent — and none of whom I am as deeply fond as I am of my buddy Tara. Check her out.
She’ll be performing next month in Austin with another singer/former student of mine, Meg Baier. Check out her site as well.
Cathy Seipp died yesterday. Her Times obituary is here. I am so sorry to see someone so young and so vital, someone with such an important (if usually incorrect) voice lose her battle with cancer.
The first thing of Cathy’s I ever read was a series of very nasty columns she wrote back in 1997 about a man I knew very well and whom I considered a dear friend, the great former L.A. Times editor Shelby Coffey III. (One such column is still online here). I was so infuriated on behalf of my friend and his family that I cursed Cathy Seipp to the high heavens, and tried to avoid reading anything else she wrote for the next few years. But her writing was too good, her views too refreshing (if still periodically infuriating). She was an important contrarian voice in the Los Angeles media world, and she will be much missed.
I note that Cathy asked for donations to the Humane Society. There’s one cause I can endorse without hesitation.
I don’t have much time for a post, but this has been on my mind.
About two weeks ago, I had a very polite argument with a fellow All Saints youth leader. One of our boys, a splendid young man nearing graduation from high school, is considering enlisting in the Army. “George” is attracted to the idea of service, he doesn’t feel ready for college, and he likes the financial benefits.
My fellow youth leader came to me and said “Hugo, you’ve got to talk George out of this.” (I have a great relationship with George, probably closer than the other youth pastors do.) I told my colleague that I would talk with George and explore his reasons for considering the military, but I had no intention of automatically discouraging him from Army service.
My classes at Pasadena City College are filled with young men and women who are veterans. I have several students this semester who’ve done time in Iraq. In conversations with a few of them, I know that they hold a widely divergent set of views about American policy over there. But virtually all — Army or Marines, as I rarely get Navy or Air Force vets — view their service as a positive. And while I have no hard evidence to support this theory, I note that my ex-service members (including many who are still in the reserves) have far better work and study habits than their peers of the same age. They aren’t necessarily any brighter, but my goodness, they have considerably more focus and initiative.
I still remain committed to the essential tenets of Christian pacifism. I am not a naturally peaceful person, mind you; my instinctive response to many of the worlds’ grossest injustices is to suggest a swift and violent solution. My heart and my soul are convinced that we are called as individuals and as citizens to “turn the other cheek”; I believe theologically that Jesus’ call to nonviolence is binding on Christians in both their private lives and in their public service. But my head tells me that sometimes violence, while never redemptive, can protect the vulnerable. As someone who teaches the young, and who longs to be a father, that protectiveness butts up against my pacifism more and more these days.
Despite my pacifism, I don’t have a knee-jerk disposition against military service. I’ve only had the chance to have one conversation with George, and I look forward to more. But I am eager to find out more about his reasons for wanting to join the Army, just as I am eager to know why one of his good friends considers UC Riverside a better fit than, say, UC Davis. I am committed to the basic notion that “my kids” are unique individuals with different paths to follow. And though I worship and volunteer in a community that is often reflexiviely anti-military, I am convinced that for some young men and women, the Army may well be the best possible option.
In April 2005, I posted this brief piece about teaching sex ed at All Saints. I took a lot of heat in the comments section, especially from many of my fellow evangelicals, for my reply to one question that the kids asked. One child asked “What do you think about us having sex at our age?” And I answered:
You guys, when I look at you, it isn’t possible for me to see you as a group of generic teenagers. When I look at this room, I don’t just see fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen year-olds. I see people whose individual stories I know. Some of you I’ve known just a little while. Some of you I’ve known since you were bratty little sixth-graders five or six years ago. When I look at you (pointing around the room), I see (names changed) Michael, not a sophomore boy. I see Marie, not a senior girl; I see Janae and Brent and Alexa and Rick, not just four random kids sitting on a couch. And though you are all alike in so many countless ways, you’re also fundamentally different people with different needs and different histories. Honestly, the more I work with you, the less I feel comfortable handing out a one-size-fits-all moral agenda with any confidence. In truth, while I think in general it is better to wait before taking on the enormous responsibilities and consequences of sex, I know full well that some of you are simply “readier” than others. I’m not going to name names, of course! But I can’t help but see you as individuals with different desires and different levels of maturity, faith, and emotional preparedness.
Many of my more liberal commenters applauded that sentiment; the conservatives considered it hopelessly wishy-washy.
But my feelings about college versus military service are more or less exactly the same! Just as I am convinced that some kids in high school are more emotionally and spiritually prepared for healthy sexual activity than others, I am equally convinced that not all are called to go directly to a four-year college. For any number of reasons, I think that a stint in the Army might be the absolute best thing for a young man or woman hungry for a very particular kind of public service, hungry to have the fast-forward button pushed on their transition into full adulthood. I’ve seen too many disaffected, directionless young men (and one or two young women) sign up for military service and come back transformed — deeper, more confident, more capable, and to my own very great surprise, more compassionate and committed to others. It’s not for everyone, but it may well be the right choice for a few. And my desire to see my kids grow and transform as individuals is greater than my own pacifist politics; my longing to see them “find themselves” trumps my own very grave misgivings about American military policy.
George hasn’t signed up yet. I hope we’ll have a chance to talk again before he does. But when we do, my thoughts will be first and foremost on what is truly good for George. Yes, I worry about him being sent to Iraq; I worry about his safety. But he’s leaving childhood behind. His parents and youth leaders must accept that part of his growth narrative will be the acceptance of great, even lethal risk. I can pray that God watches over him, as I pray for all the All Saints kids. But I won’t pray that God redirects his heart towards, say, the community college after high school. I don’t get to write the scripts my kids follow. I just get to love them through whatever they choose, and I get to give a little advice and a lot of encouragement.
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